Death Knight tanking specifically

My information structure for EJ DK Tank OP

I have posted the below on Elitist Jerks, which is the final version of the information structure I have been sharing for input (page 3).

I’ve worked out what I’d like to put into the new EJ OP for DK tanks, and what I will exclude. I’m happy to take suggestions. I’ll start the new tank thread when the Beta changes have settled to a point where we can fruitfully write about raid tanking, which should be when we’re close

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Shadowmourne for the tank

I know two tanks who wield [Shadowmourne], so if I know two there must be a few more. Khaas and Splug.

Let me hit it in the face: it should not be minmaxed to the highest dpser, it could equally go to a tank. Because this is a legendary, it takes a guild effort and guild decision to grant it to someone, and that investment must be done wisely.

People can leave

There are many stories of this and

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Offtank specs for the Lich King

Every attempt I did on the Lich King fight I played as offtank. This was my choice because I wanted to be really good at that role, and in reverse for the other two tanks in our corp to be really good MTs. By focusing on a role, I didn’t have to learn a different tanking rhythm or positioning. If I was rostered off on a night, then obviously one of the other tanks (Garant warrior or Ishkar DK) would need to play offtank, but I’m fairly sure it was always Ishkar OT and Garant MT.

I have absolutely no ego issue about whether I am tanking the named boss, or if I’m handling the off-tank duties. I am man enough to know I matter, whether I was MT or OT.

Anyhow, the point is not which class is optimal (since a DK has an easier time as MT with both [Anti-Magic Shell] and [Will of the Necropolis], optimal would be a DK MT) but that I have had enough experience as OT to write about how to spec for that role. Secondly, with the 20% buff, “optimal” on non-heroic is not a logical concept, since a warrior’s health pool is so huge plus he can use his glyphed cooldowns to solo-tank 3/4 soul reapers anyhow, then just call out for an external cooldown on the fourth. It’s not that hard. Garant used a single-target warrior spec I mentioned the other day.

Bear in mind, this is all from the perspective of a 10-man raider. I’ve not seen him on 25-man, so you might need to make some consideration for that. » continue reading

My respec for Lich King off-tank

We’ve got Lich King tomorrow. I’ve just changed my spec to suit my role as off-tank.

I handle the dredge ghouls and shambler, then taunt for soul reaper, and try to get chains of ice onto the Valkyrie.

For that specific role, I’ve changed my spec slightly from what I was using to this.

The new features are:

25 second death and decay, which makes picking up all the ghouls a guarantee on the final wave before
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Choosing your second tank spec

I have two tank specs, and most tanks who will never dps can do the same. It’s a nice situation.

When I first joined my guild, on trial, I sometimes played as a dps before securing my spot in our tank corp. At another time in the past, I had a tank spec and pvp dps spec.

This post is written for those tanks who can carry two tank specs. I’m not talking to those top 300 tanks who

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Tooltip-enabled talent tree, explains Blood

I put together a nifty talent tree, with tooltips I wrote to explain each Blood talent. I explain each talent, saying if its mandatory or not, how good it is for threat.

It looks like this, embedded it in the forum version of my blood tank 3.3.3 post. Click to go through.

I intend to use this tooltip technique to provide insight when we see the Cataclysm beta talent trees, too. I’ve provided the codes needed

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Glyph of Rune Tap

For the general non-hard mode tanking population, glyph of rune tap is a bad glyph.

A few readers noticed (and one commented on other forums, in fact in their guild application as a DK tank) that in my grid of Blood specs, the hard-mode specialised AOE spec includes this glyph.

Firstly, how’s its maths work?

Your Rune Tap heals yourself for an additional 10% of the effect, and also heals your party for 10% of their maximum health.

This

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Death Knight tank Cataclysm class review

The details have just been published, here’s the complete text.

Major changes to the rune and runic power resource system.

The matrix of Blood specs

Here is an useful way to show various talent spec choices against a matrix of survival, threat and utility indicated as a third factor. I thought I’d call it Gravity’s Grid! This can help you understand the purpose of a spec. » continue reading

You will tank in Blood, Cataclysm DK

Read it from The Man. One tank tree. Copied below in full.

On this topic, I’m going to push discussion into the forums, not here, so we can just have a single conversation. Registration is really easy and doesn’t require email activation.

This is not even the complete preview; it’s just one part! Here’s the Blood news. I like it!

We’re doing our Cataclysm preview on the death knight changes later this week, but we knew one change risked

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TankadinTPS tweak for Icy Touch threat

TankadinTPS is the mis-named addon which gives you fantastic in-game threat analysis, by ability. It knows DK threat.

Tiima posted results of some testing whilst discussing [Glyph of Disease]. Tiima makes the point the glyph of disease gives more choice to the tank: do I need more threat or self-healing?

Kuren gives the change required to the addon to correct Icy Touch is to paste this into the ttpsDeathknight.lua file around line 54:

-- Icy Touch
 [49909] = 7,

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DK tank 3.3.3 Icy Touch spam

Quite a few tanks really don’t like the idea of an Icy Touch spam build. At its most extreme, this kind of spec involves skipping any talent which helps you do strikes like [Obliterate] in favour of those which help you slam Icy Touch. The playstyle is then use death runes for icy touch.

Many tanks do not like it out of principle, and strongly argue against using it, because Blizzard have said they will nerf it if they

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DK tank doing solo raid content

Death Knights are particularly well suited to handling raid content by themselves, solo, alone, like a one-man army, because of the self-healing and extreme levels of awesomeness we DK tanks have osmotically imbued into our Blood talent tree.

It’s been something many have tried. I solo’d most of ZG on my first Gravity, tried farming the cool mounts there for a while. It gets a bit dull after a while.

One DK I know, Dywolf, has been doing it for a long while. Dywolf is a private chap, not one to talk about his achievements at all and a man who prefers short sentences. I asked if he could tell us what he’s done, how he does it and for any little tips for those who want to try solo raid content too. Here’s his story.

Persistence

Gravity: How long have you been into doing solo content?

It started with soloing Onyxia on my pal in late TBC (still pre buff). Then I tried ZG cause I never stopped wanting those mounts (none have dropped for our guild, ever). So when I got my DK up to snuff, I started going for the ZG mounts again. And then I was bored with just those two fights, so I started working on clearing all the bosses. After getting Hakkar down, I set my eyes on the other 20m, AQ. Took a bit to get Ossirian down, even when we were raiding it we didnt often get him down. And then I realized how much money theese bosses were dropping….so I kept doing it. when they nerfed the cash, so I went back to just the 2 bosses for the mounts since I had the achievements. Then I turned into an achievement whore (up to 7200, including my Loremaster title), and saw someone post about soloing MC on dkinfo. His gear was far above mine, but I decided to try anyway, and learned very quickly that I still hate Gehennas. But with a bit of luck, and the shadow resist gear from Black Temple (royal pain to track down a BS with those recipes still) I proved he could be soloed….and then after the 3rd time I started bring a mage friend just to make it easier. Raggy turned out to be a pain too. My gear wasnt sufficient so I once again turned to TBC resist gear, and he went down shortly after. On that first run Garr dropped some bindings….and that started my quest for the legendaries.

So to date I’ve solo cleared: ZG, AQ20, MC, Kara, all TBC heroics. Did AQ40 trash long enough to get the tank mounts, but Skeram is a toughy so I never went further in.

Background

Could you provide a little background on yourself including armory link, and how seriously you raid in 10 or 25s.

I like being low key so I’ll keep the armory to myself for now. I play a tauren dps DK and my name used to be funny til it got reported. Strangulate and a few others always seemed like Star Wars powers to me, so I went with that meme. Tradeskills are Alchemy and JC. I prefer frost spec still, specifically 2h frost, but Ghostcrawler says its never coming back, so I’ve made my peace with dw frost. Though there’s just something about a massive frosty cow DK with a big slow 2h that hits like a truck (old Frost strike). But Unholy is the way to go currently, and we need the debuff, so I raid that now.

But I’ve been playing since vanilla beta. Coming from EQ and a ranger/beastlord character set made a hunter. Raided with it into BWL, but got bored with it, and leveled a enh shaman for TBC. Raided with that for a bit, then took a break, came back, switched to a ret pal in Black Temple (pre-super buffs). WOTLK came out, jumped on the DK bandwagon instantly. Been in the same guild, a fairly easy going but small one, since hunter days. We’re up to Putricide in the 10m group I’m in (couldnt tell ya where the other 10m is, but its farther along). In 25 we’ve got Saurfang, but thats it cause of the dps requirements for Fester (re: small guild). Trying to get a 2nd raid night going, but as it is our one night is the only free night for some of our people. ICC going slower for us cause we lost a couple people too.

Hard bosses?

Of those bosses, which were really tricky and what did you do to overcome them?

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The third factor: utility

I am guilty of focusing on threat a lot in my analysis. I do value survival more highly, though, but perhaps it takes up less of my theorycrafting because there aren’t so many variables to consider.

Threat and survival are usually disparate goals, and you need to choose a mix of tank talents which lands you somewhere on the spectrum between them.

If you think graphically, the choices are often like this:

If you want more survival talents, those

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Unholy tank spec in 3.33

A kind of odd spec showed up as top for threat in Unholy tanking, with no [Reaping], no [Epidemic] and [Ravenous Dead]. This is in simulations only, no in-game testing. I haven’t had any corroboration yet, so watch this space.

That old chestnut of [Death and Decay] single-target rotation does even better, if you want to use it glyphed with T10 bonus. Its playstyle just feels weird to me though.

On this basis, Unholy’s threat is comparable to DW Frost, about

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Possible no-epidemic spec for Frost tank in 3.33

Just a quick note to point out a spec worth investigating further, no epidemic Frost, both DW and 2H. Read my post and discuss in forums over here.

By the way, on the website blog you’ll see “(Comments are closed)” on some blog posts, when it’s not actually true, most comments are open. It’s a bug I’m trying to fix.

DK tank in 3.33

I have given most of the lead posts a once-over where they relate to tank specs, checking for 3.33 accuracy. Largely done, and there isn’t much change in 3.33 tank specs anyhow.

The most significant change to specs is [Improved Icy Talons] which I talked about the other day. Generally Blood tanks will have already spec’d into [Will of the Necropolis], but if not, you should seriously think about it. I consider it mandatory for raiding, and optional if

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Death Knight tank spec 3.33

We’ll probably see 3.33 this week. There are a few important changes we all know about: [Icy Touch] gives loads of threat, [Will of the Necropolis] is always available and [Improved Icy Talons] stacks with itself (45% melee haste); the last being confirmed by Ghostcrawler. Other Frost changes to talents in 3.33 are not so tank-oriented but will help give us a small threat boost.

Icy Slam

Icy Touch will hit like shield slam. In Frost Presence, it will

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Notes on killing Lich King, for DK tanks

Splug has offered a few tips on tanking the Lich King, which are worth noting. Interesting question there about Unholy possibly being useful, and on death drip the phase 1 shambling horror, which indicate a DK has some specific advantages?

Bone shield has 2s cooldown

A writer on EJ did enough tests to confirm the length of [Bone Shield] internal cooldown, for each charge to be used up: 2 seconds. It might be slightly lower than that, in fact, but its certainly no longer. He got 40 mobs to attack him and looked at the time between bone shield activation and it fading.

Bone shield is not 2.5 or 3 seconds, as often quoted around the internet. It’s a measly 2 seconds, maybe slightly

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Interaction of rune strike with melee haste

I wanted to share a snippet on this finding I made whilst trying to verify the value of [Improved Icy Talons] in my previous analysis.

I thought at first Kahorie’s had a bug in the way it handled melee haste, because I was seeing a disproportionate increase in mainhand damage, beyond the 20% a windfury buff should give. Simply turned out I wasn’t adding [Rune Strike] and mainhand hits together before checking they had increased by 20% (oops).

So,

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Unbreakable armour, damage reduction

I put together a quick spreadsheet to work out what damage reduction you get from [Unbreakable Armor]. In my gear, approximately, I’d take 13.5% less damage when it’s up than with just base armour in frost presence. It would be 15.8% if it was glyphed too.

I’m thinking of going to Frost for ICC, since so many bosses suit a physical damage reduction tanking style. I’m currently Blood. I’ll probably go into [Acclimation] too, two-handed, two disease. I will

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Tanking to be less squishy

DK tanks can feel squishy compared to block-tanks in 5-mans. You can offset a lot of this through skill. We have a pretty impressive arsenal to use.

Here are some important pointers which are often overlooked by new DK tanks. It’s a good checklist.

Tank tree cooldowns

Use your tree’s big cooldown a lot: [Vampiric Blood], [Unbreakable Armor] or [Bone Shield]. They’ve got short cooldowns. Use them on trash.

I use UA on trash very happily, it’s ideal for that purpose. BS is just awesomeness and AMZ can be very nice but most Unholy DKs will have spec’d into threat instead of that talent.

Many padawans tanks save all their cooldowns for bad moments then end up struggling on trash. On a boss fight, of course, you should save them for the damage spikes you know about. On trash though, use them on the pull to reduce initial damage or if you get to 50% health during the pull. Don’t do 10 minutes of trash and never use your cooldowns.

VB isn’t so great in 5-mans, as its more a throughput talent that’s for raiding, so in 5-mans its better suited to oh-shit moments than the other two trees. That said, blood has Rune Tap which can be used liberally.

Icebound Fortitude

Think ahead, and don’t waste [Icebound Fortitude] if you are going to need it on the boss who’s coming up, or a huge pull of AOE adds, but otherwise use it liberally.

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Weapon speed effect on dual-wield tanking

Dual-wield frost tanking threat is effected by the weapon speed.

My weapons. I have two: Black Icicle, and I also have two Rimefang’s Claw. They’re not hard to get, just takes time.

Using my own gear (i232 average), the simulated difference is that those two slow dps weapons (always both with [Rune Of The Nerubian Carapace], for stamina), do ~13% more threat than fast/fast.

A slow/fast combo is 8% more threat than fast/fast.

Runeforges
With slow/fast, if you put fallen crusader (“FC”) on the fast off-hand, you get about 12% more threat than fast/fast, which is another nice middle-ground. FC is better than Razorice (“RI”).

With slow/slow, if you go fallen crusader main-hand and razorice on off-hand to max out threat, it’s a 6% threat gain over two Nerubians. Quite a lot.

Fast/fast with FC and RI, is 6% more than fast/fast Nerubian.

Presumes you’re still over 540 (or 535 defence for 5-mans) without Nerubian. I value stamina highly, so wouldn’t recommend DPS runeforges in a raid (unless it was Ulduar or something below your gear level).

Tabulated answers

Using i232 gear levels, for a 5-man tank. I include the absolute threat values from Kahorie’s sim (v1.202), then I indexed them to a baseline of the fast/fast, and put that index in brackets (it’s a percentage). Obviously, the damage difference is because of strike damage being higher with two slow weapons.

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Dual-wield, weapon speed and expertise

Frost dual-wield tanking is very popular now. Six months ago, many people were violently against the idea. A year ago, it was so bad I put up a sticky on deathknight.info and policed all discussion into it, because it came up all the time.

Now, it seems to be a debate of the past. I barely ever see questions about parrygib or complaints that DW Frost tanks are dying because they’re pretending to be rogues, or whatever. A few things changed, notably the Nerubian runeforge and the Thassarian talent, but I also think people just realised parrygib risk is negligible now because they didn’t see DW tanks dying like the naysayers had suggested. Some of the bosses also have parry-hasted turned off by Blizzard.

Here, I’m going to revisit the relationship between expertise and weapon speed for tanks, and weapon speed and threat. I’m not going to cover the basics here, that’s in my main dual-wield tank post. I’ll compare DKs with Warriors for baseline purposes.

Warrior parry-haste risk

I need to the number of parryable attacks per minute.

Special attacks

All of a warrior’s tanking attacks can be parried except for shockwave, thunderclap, demo shout and conc blow. Even revenge and heroic strike can be parried. Those unparryable attacks are lower in the priority system used by tanks in a typical fight.

A warrior’s threat priority has two parallel streams: (1) shield slam > revenge > devastate > shockwave | concussion blow; and (2) heroic strike, when it doesn’t conflict with the first stream. See readers’ comments below for elaboration.

Let’s assume in every minute a warrior uses: thunderclap once, demo shout twice and conc blow once. Those five attacks can’t be parried. Let’s also assume a fight where the warrior is not rage starved, and can just keep going at it.

There are 40 GCDs in a minute. Five are used on non-parryable specials, leaving 35.

Auto-attack

There’s also auto-attack, at weapon speed, the whole time. Many of them should be replaced by heroic strike, but since that can be parried too, for this analysis it nets neutral. Let’s use Rimefang, 1.6 speed. Lovely tanking weapon and readily accessible.

Auto-attack at 1.6 speed is another 37.5 attacks per minute.

Total

Grand total of 72.5 parryable attacks per minute, based on specials + auto attack.

Side note: When first writing this analysis, had thought the best way to work it out was to look at a log parse, and take the proportions of attacks used. After feedback from readers, it appears that was unnecessary since the proportions of attacks would only matter if a good number of them cannot be parried. I have included the logs I did look at in ‘further reading’ below, in case you’d like some verification of what happens in Saurfang.

Death Knight

It’s more difficult to model the interaction of a DKs abilities such as Rime, so I’ve used the simulator to get an ideal case.

Special attacks

A two-disease DK priority will be: icy touch > plague strike > rime howling blast> obliterate > blood strike > frost strike. A Frost DK played appropriately will use Howling Blast on every Rime proc, which is not parryable.

A single-disease DK will not use plague strike, but for modelling I’ll base it on two diseases since it’s a worst-case for the boss gaining parry-haste.

Persistence

Background

Hard bosses?

Tank tree cooldowns

Icebound Fortitude

Tabulated answers

Warrior parry-haste risk

Death Knight

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